ROLAND LEONG'S HAWAIIAN RACE CARS

From WikipediaRoland Leong (born 1945) is an American drag racer, whose "Hawaiian" Top Fuel Dragsters swept the National Hot Rod Association's two National Events, the Winternationals at the Pomona Fairgrounds and the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, two years consecutively, in 1965 and again in 1966. This feat by Leong's entries was accomplished with two different drivers, as Don "the Snake" Prudhomme scored the back-to-back victories in 1965, followed by Mike Snively in 1966. In 1967, Leong failed to three-peat at Pomona or Indianapolis, but did triumph that year at two popular independent drag races, the notoriously fierce March Meet in Bakersfield, and the Hot Rod Magazine Championships in Riverside, CA.

In 1969, abandoned campaigning Top Fuel Dragster in favor of the burgeoning Funny Car class. The following year, with driver Larry Reyes, Leong campaigned a 1970 Dodge Charger AA/Funny Car that won its class at the 1970 NHRA Winternationals. In 1971, Leong's "Hawaiian" Funny Car repeated at Pomona, winning Funny Car Eliminator again, this time with Butch Maas driving.

Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Leong campaigned a variety of "Hawaiian" Funny Cars, both in NHRA competition, as well as "match racing" at smaller, independent tracks.

In 1980, having hired Ron Colson to drive in what was that man's final year as a professional race-car driver, Leong tuned his "King's Hawaiian Bread" Corvette Funny Car to victory at the NHRA Winston World Finals in Ontario, California. Besides being Colson's last race, the event was also notable as being the last drag race at Ontario Motor Speedway. In 1983, with MIke Dunn at the helm, Leong's "Hawaiian Punch" Funny Car won the Bakersfield March Meet. The car crashed and was destroyed later that year at the NHRA World Finals at Orange County International Raceway.

After Leong and Dunn parted ways in 1984, Leong and his new driver, Rick Johnson, won the 1985 Bakersfield March Meet, followed later that year by a victory at NHRA's Le Grandnational-Molson in Quebec, Canada.

In 1991, Leong once again won the US Nationals at Indianapolis, this time in Funny Car Eliminator, and with Jim White driving. Later, at the Chief Nationals in Dallas, Texas, his "Hawaiian Punch" Funny Car was the first in the class to break the 290-mph speed mark.

Following the 1991 season, Roland relinquished his role as car owner. In 1996, he began serving as a crew chief for the Red Line Oil Dodge Avenger Funny Car of Ray Higley. Despite the entry's limited finances, with Leong's input and expertise, Higley posted his career-best 1/4-mile elapsed time, posting a 5.00-second clocking at the 1996 US Nationals. In 1998, Don Prudhomme, then retired from driving and now a multi-car team owner, hired Leong to tune his "Skoal" Funny Car. With Ron Capps driving, Prudhomme's Leong-tuned entry won Funny Car Eliminator at that year's Winternationals. Despite winning more NHRA National Events than anybody else in the class, the Prudhomme-Leong-Capps collaboration finished second in NHRA points, behind winner John Force.

In 2009, after having taken a hiatus from the sport, Leong returned to drag racing, now acting as crew chief for "vintage" Nitro Funny Cars racing primarily in NHRA's new Hot Rod Heritage Series. In 2014, Canadian drag racer Ron Hodgson hired Leong to tune the Troy Lee Designs Nitro Funny Car driven by Tim Boychuk, for competition in the NHRA Heritage Series.

Getting To Know Roland Leong - The HawaiianWritten by Cole Coonce on May 1, 2010

After Dominating National Events With His AA/Fueler During Drag Racing's Beginnings, Followed By Years Of Night-After-Night Nitromania With His Iconic Funny Cars, Roland Leong Is A Man Of The Moment.

When you get to Roland Leong's house on the west side of Los Angeles, a sign in the front yard politely requests that the visitor "enter with the aloha spirit." Roland lives off of the marina and is "never far from the beach." With that in mind, we make our way to a seaside mini-mall in search of sushi, where he can tell us about the arc of his career in drag racing. En route, somewhere around Pacific Coast Highway, Roland tells us that a very prominent multicar team owner recently asked him to oversee his drag racing operation in Indianapolis, but the deal breaker was that Roland would have to relocate to Indy, so far from the placid calm of the Pacific Ocean.

Once seated at the bar among delicacies, we appropriately ordered the Hawaiian roll. And then Roland began to tell his tale, the story of a shy drag racer from Oahu who came to California, raced ruthlessly, refused to suffer fools gladly, and dominated the competition until the operating capital disappeared unexpectedly. Even then, he found a couple of ways to jump back in the fray. All this began humbly at The Beach-Lions Drag Strip-with a frightening anecdote about dragster driver Don "The Snake" Prudhomme strapping the cherubic 20-year-old Roland into his first, immaculate, Hawaiian AA/Fuel Dragster.

"He was a young kid who wanted to get into drag racing," Prudhomme wrote in Six Seconds to Glory. "He was pretty bucks-up but didn't know how to unscrew spark plugs yet. Roland decided to build a blown Double-A fuel dragster. We took it out to the dragstrip, and Roland got in the car. He was so short, he could hardly see over the windshield. He got about halfway down the track, decided, 'Hey, you've got to steer one of these things,' and drove it off the side, over the railroad tracks, and into the weeds. Roland got out of the car so dazed he didn't know what happened. Couldn't even remember leaving the starting line. He decided he didn't want to be a driver anymore and would just work on the car."

"I don't know what to tell you-he wasn't a driver," Don said recently, recalling that fateful day at Lions Drag Strip. "It was a really short driving career," Don concluded. "It lasted less than 7 seconds.""I was joking with Prudhomme a couple of months ago, and I said, 'If I didn't crash, both of us might not be here today,'" Roland says between slurps of miso soup.

"The Monday after that weekend, Keith Black told me, 'If you got hurt or killed, what would I tell your parents? You should hire Prudhomme.' And that's how it started."

The collaboration of these two precocious young men, with tuning advice from motor-monger KB, dominated Professional Drag Racing in 1965, winning Top Fuel Eliminator at the two biggest drag races on the planet: the National Hot Rod Association's Winternationals in Pomona and the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis.

After his '65 Winternationals triumph, Roland says: "I wanted to go Back East and race Don Garlits, Connie Kalitta, and the rest of the big guys. So Prudhomme booked the car and off we went."But after their initial triumph, inexplicably, the man Roland called Vipe said mahalo and waved aloha. "At the time it was the biggest mistake of my career," Don concluded about leaving such a dominating entity. "Although it paid off later on."

"After Prudhomme quit, I got Mike Snively," Roland says, poking around some slices of ginger with his chopsticks. "I called tracks trying to book the car and said, 'This is Roland Leong; I own The Hawaiian.' And all the response I got was, 'Well, we've already got Prudhomme.' So we went out, ran Pomona, and won the race a second time. Then they started calling me."

In 1966, it wasn't just the Winternationals again. Just like the summer before, The Hawaiian carved up the challengers at Indy like a ripe pineapple. And that year, relationships were forged across the country with race promoters and track operators who would enable Roland to make money beyond the NHRA circuit. The Hawaiian was arguably the Big Kahuna and certainly da kine.

With his repeated success with two different drivers, Roland might've begun considering drivers somewhat replaceable, if not superfluous. For Roland, it was about the hardware, not necessarily the meat-ware.

"Because of my association with Keith Black, I was the first guy on the West Coast to run a late-model 426 engine in a nitro car. The guy who was Keith Black's boss at the time, who ran the Chrysler marine program, came to me and said, 'I'll give you the engine. Let Black build it, we'll just pay for the upkeep, and you can keep all the money that it makes.'"

Soon it would make money. With Snively shoeing the 392-propelled digger and Mike "Sork" Sorokin doing the research and development of the 426-powered slingshot, Roland campaigned two dragsters and continued to rack up prestigious victories, including at the Bakersfield March Meet and the Hot Rod Magazine Championship Drags at Riverside Raceway and Mr. USA Eliminator in Cecil County, Maryland. But winning those meets and vanquishing the elite drag racers wasn't quite lucrative enough to keep Roland rolling in rum and pork.

"At the time, there weren't very many people who made a living drag racing. That's all I did," Roland explains. "We made more money matching. At the end of 1968, I realized the Funny Car could run a lot more times: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays."

As testament to the circuit's gonzo schedule, Roland reminisces about one weekend when his second Funny Car wasn't even painted, but they pounded pavement with it anyway.

"I shoe-polished 'Hawaiian' on the side of the car. There were three races that weekend: Irwindale, Orange County, and Carlsbad. We went to Irwindale, won Irwindale. We went to Orange County for a Hang Ten race with 16 cars-a pretty decent field. That paid $500 for Low Elapsed Time of every round. Well, we had low e.t. of every round. Then we went to Carlsbad and won Carlsbad, too. We won all three races and had a hell of a payday."

Ferociously flogging a Funny Car five days a week was a challenge Roland relished ("When we went Back East, we were 'the guys'"), but not all of his drivers were necessarily up to the torrid and relentless pace or ready for the discipline necessary to stay ahead of their coast-to-coast adversaries.

So as Roland motored down the road, his hired drivers came and went. Phil Burgess, editor of National Dragster, once quipped: "Roland changed drivers like some of us change socks."

We wrote to some of Roland's former drivers and asked about their experiences racing with him. Among those who responded was Gordie Bonin, who raced for Roland in 1973 and in 1993. ("I'm thinking I was the only driver he ever asked to drive for him again," Gordie surmised cheekily.)

As to Roland's approach to competition, Gordie, a respected journeyman whose accomplishments include being the first driver to record a speed of 240 mph in a Funny Car, described him as "plenty fierce. He always wanted/expected to win. He'd always get us together-no matter how few or many we had on the team-and get his point across: Winning was the only reason we raced."

"I went through so many drivers for various reasons," Roland explains. "You know we all were a lot younger and thought a lot different back then. I didn't feel some were as competitive as I; with some, we didn't get along as well as I first thought and some wanted to run the car their way."

And so it went from the '70s, '80s, and early '90s with Gordie, Norm Wilcox, Pat Foster, Denny Savage, Mike Dunn, Jim White, Ron Colson, and a bushel of other hot shoes barnstorming a litany of luau-themed Funny Cars across the mainland, banking appearance money, claiming tournament purses, and cashing checks from a coterie of corporate sponsors as The Hawaiian became the Revell Hawaiian née Avanti Hawaiian, King's Hawaiian Bread, Power Gloss Hawaiian, Hawaiian Punch, and finally, Hawaiian Vacation.

Even with the corporate patronage, nitro racing became more expensive, and match racing became cost prohibitive, a money loser for racer and promoter alike, so Roland beat it back to the front of his first feats, the NHRA circuit-albeit, while looking for another competitive edge. This time, instead of the 426's thermodynamic hammer, he found something more slippery.

"In 1987 I talked Chrysler into going into a wind tunnel. The first time we went, we had no idea what to expect. We went to the Winternationals the next year and became the first car to run in the 5.50s-5.58-and we ran Top Speed of the Meet at 253 mph. That made me look like a hero-like we did something."

It got better. "We got another wind tunnel test in 1990. We broke the national record five times that year and were the first car to run more than 290 mph. We won the Big Bud Shootout and Indy in the same weekend."

But just as the trade winds gust warm, they suddenly blew frigid. With Gordie back behind the butterflies, Roland inked a Hawaiian Vacation sponsorship, ostensibly good for three years and brokered through that state's Department of Economics, Business and Tourism. But instead of continuing to stalk and terrorize his drag racing foes, Roland saw his tenure as owner/operator of his own Funny Car business vaporize.

"The money that they supplied me at the time was good for about three months," Roland recalls. Then the checks stopped. He sold everything. His days as an owner/operator of an immaculate and awe-inspiring operation were over. For a while, he tuned up old friend and bucks-down racer Ray Higley. Despite a modicum of success on next to no budget, Roland was merely treading water.

Meanwhile, one of Roland's serpentine alums found himself on a soul-crushing losing streak-and under a lot of pressure from his tobacco sponsor to perform commensurately with the high-finance budget. Retired from driving and now a car owner, Don Prudhomme sought out Roland's advice and expertise-and then put his old boss on his team's payroll. "I brought him on because Roland is good," Don remembered. "He's a real good manager of people and he knows what he's doing."

One of the first things Roland did was visit General Motors' wind tunnel to evaluate and reshape Don's Camaro body. "In 1998 we won more races than John Force," Roland says. "I guess that got Force interested in looking at the wind tunnel and doing work on his Mustang bodies. We beat him a lot. But we ended up number two."

Perhaps because during their initial collaboration-where Roland and Don conquered like kings, crushing and eating the hearts out of his competition while claiming the number one spot whenever the big money and prestige were on the line-number two wasn't acceptable. The two men parted ways yet again.

"I think I fired his ass," Snake said with a laugh. "What happened? Who knows? We had a disagreement about something-the way I ran versus they way he would-the way two buddies running a car would have. The good news is that at the end of all this we're friends."

When Don said "the end of all this," he meant it, having just packed it in from professional drag racing altogether, a fortnight before he answered questions about Roland. Like Roland's previous plight, the checks have just stopped coming.

The Snake's forced retirement could be seen as a metaphor for modern, professional drag racing's expensive, continuing implosion ("Last year my parts bills were $100,000 a month," Don lamented). This lopsided inequity has created a subculture of Nitro Funny Cars in NHRA's Heritage Series, where due to a more equitable ratio of bang to buck, there has been an explosion of activity-and the reappearance of Roland Leong, who, because of his experience and fierce dedication to winning, finds himself at the core of this movement.

Currently, when not hanging loose with his grandkids (Collin, Jade, Natalie, and Kaya), Roland is tuning up Tim Boychuck's tsunami-fast Firebird. This collaboration has been mixing it up at dragstrips from California to Canada and in its debut in competition at Mission Raceway was victorious over the vintage scene's premiere Fuel coupes, while setting top speed of the meet ("I guess it was our turn," is how Roland humbly rationalizes that weekend's master stroke.)

As the soy sauce-soiled check came, we asked Roland about his motivation to continue to race: "I'm not there to socialize. I'm not there to have a party. I want to beat everybody and then I'll go party with the best of them. But prior to that, I'm only there for one reason: to get the job done."

"Dealing with track managers and the companies that were into drag racing really helped me, but I was pretty intimidated for a long time because of my ethnic status." -Roland Leong

"At this point in my life, I'm not going to own any of my own stuff-been there, done that. Whomever I'm going to go to work for, if they don't want be competitive and want to win, then I don't want to do it. I want to win - that's what gives you satisfaction." -Roland Leong

"In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, a lot of people match raced, but I don't think there were a lot of drag racers making a living with just their cars. At the time, there weren't very many people who made a living drag racing. That's all I did." -Roland Leong

PHOTORoland's bespectacled mom, Teddy Leong, who bought the first Hawaiian Fueler and Keith Black, who supplied the engine, help 20-year-old Roland and his driver, 23-year-old Don Prudhomme, bask in the '65 NHRA Winternationals' winner's circle. Such early successes explain Roland's later intolerance for losing.

An evening at Berserko Bobs Lounge was the high light of going to Englishtown to the NHRA race.I have one of his T shirts, first prize for winning the suntan contest (Tanned left arm no tan right armfrom driving the tow truck with your arm out the window). This was back when racing was fun. Jim

An evening at Berserko Bobs Lounge was the high light of going to Englishtown to the NHRA race.I have one of his T shirts, first prize for winning the suntan contest (Tanned left arm no tan right armfrom driving the tow truck with your arm out the window). This was back when racing was fun. Jim